| Type | Subsidiary of OpenText |
|---|---|
| Industry | content management, portal, collaboration, document management, and records management |
| Founded | 1995, Sigma Partners |
| Headquarters | Austin, Texas (registered) |
| Key people | Mike Aviles, Chief Executive Officer |
| Employees | about 670 (2008) |
| Website | www.vignette.com |
Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN) is a company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that offers a suite of content management, portal, collaboration, document management, and records management software. On May 6, 2009 Open Text Corporation announced they would buy Vignette for $310 million.[1] On July 21, 2009 Open Text Corporation completed its acquisition of Vignette Corporation.[2]
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Vignette's Platform consists of several suites of products allowing non-technical business users to create, edit and track content through workflows and publish this content through Web or portal sites. Vignette also provides integration solutions for ERP, CRM and legacy systems. The Vignette platforms provide support for Java EE and .NET. For the former, the JSR 286 specification is implemented.
The company holds more than 40 U.S. patents.[3]
Many large websites run Vignette, including UnitedHealth Group, Disney, Wachovia, Martha Stewart, Fox News Digital, National Geographic, MetLife and BSkyB. Vignette provided the technical platform for the 2004 Summer Olympics website. In 2008, NASA credited Vignette Portal as a "key tool the team uses in-house to keep the content organized."[4] Sites running versions of Vignette software prior to V7 are generally easy to identify by the format of their story URLs, which are mostly numeric strings with several commas as separators.
In November 1995 Ross Garber and Neil Webber started Vignette with the goal of making web publishing easier and more personalized.[5] The company's seed round investors were Austin Ventures and Sigma Partners. Garber and Webber had previously worked with John Thornton of Austin Ventures when they were employed at DAZEL Corporation, and also with Bob Davoli at Sigma Partners, when Davoli was CEO of Epoch Systems and Garber and Webber were early employees in the 1990s.
Vignette's first product development effort was focused on large-scale content management workflow processes. This product, which was announced but never shipped, was called StoryBuilder. During the initial StoryBuilder development cycle, Vignette partnered with CNET, which had developed an internal technology called PRISM that allowed for very large scale database-driven web site creation and delivery. CNET, which wanted a third party to commercialize the product, decided to spin the technology off to Vignette, also invested $500,000, for a 33% stake in Vignette. Vignette rapidly commercialized the technology into a product called StoryServer, which shipped in January 1997. The StoryBuilder technology was later merged into the StoryServer product, and shipped in September 1997.[6]
In the 1990s, Vignette's IDE and API offered a convenient alternative to conventional CGI/vi/Perl web development, and the company managed to sign up 130 customers by 1998.[6]
In June 1998, Garber hired Greg Peters to succeed him as Chief Executive Officer, and Garber became Chairman of the Board. Vignette's IPO took place on February 19, 1999, and became one of the ten most successful "dot-com" IPOs of the year. Garber left the company later in 1999, and Webber retired in early 2000.
The company made several acquisitions over the years, including e-business application vendor OnDisplay for $1.4B in 2000,[7] enterprise portal software vendor Epicentric for $32M in 2002,[8] CMS vendor Intraspect for $20M in 2003,[9] Tower Technology, an Australian-based provider of enterprise document and records management solutions, in 2004 for $125M,[10] and Vidavee, a SaaS-based Web video publishing company in 2008.[11]
In 2008 Vignette was experiencing a downward trajectory as gross profit was down and net income were negative (Q2 2008 vs. Q2 2007).[12][13] The company reported a loss of a little over $863,000 in Q2 of 2008, compared to a net gain of $4 million in Q2 of 2007.[12][13] However, the company has no debt and about $150 million in cash. Vignette launched a dozen products in 2008 and needs to prove the value of these products by producing license revenue.[12][13]
On May 6, 2009, Open Text Corporation announced they would buy Vignette for $310 million.[1] On July 21, 2009 Open Text Corporation completed its acquisition of Vignette Corporation.[2]
Vignette Content Management helps organizations create and manage content for enterprise Internet, extranet or intranet applications. It is designed for Web content creators, contributors and administrators in IT and marketing departments. Vignette Content Management's predecessor, StoryServer is widely considered the first Web content management system. Vignette Media is a specialized content management system for telco, media and entertainment companies who need a digital publishing platform. It provides industry-specific workflows, content types and tools.
Vignette Portal is integrated tightly with Vignette Content Management. The Portal is built upon the Epicentric Foundation Server, which Vignette acquired in 2003. Vignette has been a participant of JSR 286 and WSRP 2.0 standards bodies. Current versions of Vignette Portal support these standards for portlets.
Vignette Portal supports deployment on Tomcat, Weblogic, Websphere and SunOne application servers.
Released in 2008, Vignette's Social Media products include Vignette Community Applications and Vignette Community Services. These products help organizations add social computing applications such as blogs, wikis, ratings and forums to their Web sites. In October the company demonstrated a solution template with additional functionality that includes photo and video sharing, idea management, member profiles and social recommendations.
Released in 2008 following the acquisition and integration of Vidavee, Vignette Video is a hosted video management solution that provides capabilities to upload, transcode, manage and deliver video. The new product also includes a customizable Flash-based media player that allows users to tag and share any segment of a video. Vignette's Video technology includes a dozen patents for advanced functionality like video tags and heat maps. Vignette Video Services can be integrated into any website (does not require Vignette Content Management) and is sold as a service.
Vignette Recommendations was announced in January 2008 as part of an OEM agreement with Baynote. Recommendations uses the wisdom of the crowd to help organizations recommend new products or content. Vignette Recommendations was named Best Web 2.0 Technology by UK-based Incisive Media at its inaugural Web 2.0 Innovation Awards presentation in London.[14]
The latest release of Vignette Recommendations (7.1) includes several enhancements to the Baynote engine including skins, a recommendations console for online marketers and gatget/widget publishing functionality.
Resulting from the acquisition of Tower, Vignette offers IDM and VRD document management and record storage software. A few banks use Vignette's software to store over a billion records. Case Manager is a new product aimed at human-centric processes where a full BPM deployment would be overkill, such as loan origination or insurance claim management.